Today I was reminded of men and their hobbies, things they spend a lot of money on for awhile, and then move on to something else.

I can remember my mother saying once that my dad would find a hobby and go at it with a lot of gusto, and then drop it for something else. I think that's fairly typical of a lot of us, but maybe his was more extreme. My mother's hobby/money making sideline was sewing, and it was something she did all her life, so by contrast I suppose my dad's passion for flying a small plane that turned into stock car racing that turned into water skiing looked frivolous.

My father-in-law, the munchkin, bought a watch repair case at a garage sale and for many years he repaired watches and clocks, but then moved on to radios, televisions, and lately vacuum cleaners and fans he rescues from dumpsters at his townhouse community.

My own Mr. Troutbend, before we got married all those years ago, put together model cars and airplanes. When he got done with that hobby, he threw most of them away and saved the wheels in a box as a memento. Then, he collected coins. When we got married, he showed me his small collection, stored in a fishing tackle box, odds and ends of foreign coins. My dad collected coins for awhile, when he was the president of a bank, and he gave us that collection. He must have spent a lot of time at work going through the pennies finding the good ones.

Then, Mr. Troutbend's college buddies bought Shopsmiths. It's a multipurpose woodworking machine that functions as a router, a drill press, a planer, a lathe, you name it - so of course Mr. Tbend wanted one. I made him buy a used one out of the want ads because I knew he wouldn't get his money's worth from a new one. In the 26 years he's had it, I think he's made four items. But the idea is that it's there should he feel inspired to construct something.

I'm not even going to bring up the Beanie Baby/Happy Meal Toys hobby. Oh, all right, too late, I've brought it up. When he worked in aerospace, he and his buddies decided that Beanie Babies were going to increase in value so they set out to acquire a lot of them. Last year I got tired of paying the rental on a storage unit and we moved the collection here to the house and inventoried it. They really are cute stuffed animals, I have to say that. But oh my goodness, it wasn't enough to own one or two of them, he has multiples. If they ever come back into style to where he might get back what he paid, it probably won't be in our lifetime. This is a perfect example of the artificial collectibles market that our generation made popular. But I guess he had fun tracking them down and looking forward to finding new ones when they first came out. Don't bother telling me that we should try to sell them on eBay. Nobody is buying, and the bother wouldn't be worth it.

What about me, you ask. Haven't I had my crazes and fads? Don't I have craft supplies stashed in the attic, thinking I'll get back to that particular hobby some day? Yes I suppose I do. Of course I can rationalize all of it, since it's me writing about it. A lot of what is stored away is waiting for me to have the courage to start the project, confident that I'll be able to complete it in a manner that I would find satisfactory, the curse of the perfectionist. But maybe this year I'll liberate some of it, take a stab at a watercolor painting, make a Roman shade, that kind of thing, so then I could say I tried that craft and now I can donate the supplies to the thrift store.

I never got into cookie jar collecting, but I do have this one: